WHEN MORNING CAME
Neither of the boys would be likely to forget that night of the storm,
when they passed so many wretched hours in their rude shelter. It was
pretty cold, being without a blanket and unable to move around so as
to keep their blood in circulation, though, after all, they realized
that it hardly deserved the name of a blizzard.
“Oh, thank goodness, it’s really getting daylight, Bluff!” Jerry
called out, at last, arousing the other from a nap.
“And the snow seems to have stopped pretty much, likewise that awful
wind,” remarked his companion, as he, too, took an observation.
“Let’s get outside and stretch a bit,” proposed Jerry. “I feel as
though I were seventy years old, and every bone and muscle in my body
creaks or pains like everything.”
“A good idea, Jerry, and I’m with you,” Bluff conceded. “After we’ve
jumped around a while, we’ll get limbered up. Here you go, now!”
They proceeded to carry on as if they had just escaped from an asylum,
waltzing this way and that, clasped in each other’s arms, or
attempting some sort of darky hoedown—anything to get their muscles
in shape.
“There, that makes me feel young again!” declared Jerry, panting as he
threw himself down beside the fire.
“The next burning question of the day is: What will you have for
breakfast?” demanded Bluff; and with that he commenced to rattle off a
great variety of dishes, beginning with ham and eggs, coffee, wheat
cakes with maple syrup, and so on down the list.
Jerry presently threw up his hands, and as the other continued to
tantalize him by keeping up a running fire of breakfast hints, he even
went so far as to thrust his fingertips in his ears.
“That’s adding insult to injury, Bluff,” he told his chum, when he
found a chance to speak. “Because I don’t believe we could scare up a
scrap of grub this morning, no matter how hard we searched our
pockets. We cleaned it all out at suppertime, you remember.”
“Well, there’s one last resort, if we _have_ to come to it!”
remarked Bluff, with an assumed dejected air, as he rubbed his chin
between his thumb and forefinger.
Something about his manner caused Jerry to look at him in horror.
“Now, I can guess what you’re hinting at, and I tell you right
straight from the shoulder I never could be hired to eat wolf, not if
I was actually starving.”
“Oh, well, I can’t say I’m really hankering after the dish myself,”
Bluff admitted; “but you never can tell what you may have to come to.
Some people don’t like to eat crow, but it’s been found they’re not so
_very_ bad, after all. It might turn out the same way with wolf.”
“Are you going to help me get that jacket off the rascal?” demanded
Jerry.
“Sure I will!” he was told. “You’d make a sorry mess of the job, I
reckon; and if the thing’s worth saving at all it ought to be taken
the right way. I don’t say I could do it as well as Frank, who’s had a
heap more experience; but you’ll get the pelt, Jerry, never fear.”
“Then the sooner we finish the job the better,” said the other boy;
“because it strikes me we had better be leaving here and heading for
home as soon as we can make it. I only hope we don’t get lost, and
that we strike camp in time for the middle-of-the-day feed.”
Both were speedily engaged in the task of taking off the skin of the
slain wolf. Bluff did the main part of the work, but the other was
handy at times in various ways.
“I don’t remember hearing another howl the whole night through; did
you, Bluff?” Jerry presently asked, when the skin had been rolled up
in as compact a bundle as possible.
“Can’t say that I did,” was the reply.
“And now, do we make a start for home?” demanded Jerry anxiously. “I
hope you’ve got your bearings all correct.”
“Leave that for me,” the other boy replied; “but before we quit this
region for good I’d like to take a turn over yonder.” And he pointed
in a quarter which his chum knew took in the region where they had had
the meeting with Bill Nackerson and his two friends, after bringing
down the big moose.
“Yes, we ought to see what became of our moose, hadn’t we?” Jerry
admitted.
“That’s right, for I’d like to get hold of those splendid horns. But
there’s another thing I want to find out.”
“Yes, I can give a pretty good guess what it is,” the other told him.
“I’ve been worried some, myself, about it. Lots of times in the night,
when I was lying listening to the wind moan and howl, I found myself
wondering how those three men were making out, if, as we had an idea,
they couldn’t scare up a match among ’em.”
“Come along, let’s hike out that way,” said Bluff, frowning, as though
he did not feel any too happy at the thought. “After all, it isn’t
going to be so very much out of our way.”
They took one last look at the rude shelter that had served them so
well in warding off considerable of the storm’s violence. Often in
memory they would again see that bough barricade; and even take note
of the hole which the bold wolf had torn in it.
Bluff walked along with a confident tread. Jerry was pleased to note
this, for it assured him his chum really knew where he was heading and
the chances of their becoming lost in the Big Woods were not serious.
“I tell you I’m glad I’ve got as fine a woodsman along as you are,” he
remarked, after a little while; “because, if I had been alone, while I
might be able to locate north by means of the compass, I declare I
could not tell whether home lay to the north, east, west, or south. So
what good would a compass be to such a greenhorn, I’d like to know?”
Bluff liked to hear such talk; any boy would when he set up to be an
authority on woodcraft.
“We’re going to hit the place right soon now,” he assured his
companion soberly and with a manner that showed that Bluff did not
think he was doing anything so very wonderful in leading the way back
to the scene of the previous afternoon’s double adventure.
Three minutes later he spoke again.
“There, you can see the leaning pine right now. That was only twenty
feet or so away from where we dropped our moose.”
“I don’t see anything that looks like a camp,” hinted Jerry.
“No; seems as though they must have cleared out,” he was told; “but
they couldn’t take the moose along with ’em, of course.”
“What became of it, then?”
“We’ll find that out soon enough. Just follow me, will you? Looks as
though there had been a banquet around here, seems to me. Hi! see the
bones, would you? And the snow’s all trampled down, with patches of
red showing through it here and there.”
“Bluff, the wolves struck this place after we chased ’em away; or else
this may have been another lot of them. They cleaned up our moose,
hide and all. But, tell me, isn’t that the skull and the horns over
there?”
“Just what it is!” Bluff exclaimed, as he started on a run for the
spot, to bend anxiously over the object that was half concealed in a
drift, and then joyfully burst out: “Jerry, they haven’t been hurt a
single bit. Why, we ought to thank those wolves for gnawing all the
flesh off! It’ll be easy enough now to hack the horns out with our
hatchet. And as we’ve got so little to tote back home with us, mebbe
we’d better try and get our prize there.”
“I wouldn’t like to risk leaving such wonderful horns here,” Jerry
replied seriously. “Any sportsman happening on them would be tempted
to make out that he had killed the big moose himself. What do you
really think could have become of those men, Bluff?” he presently
asked, uneasily; which question proved how the thought was worrying
him.
“Oh, like as not they made up their minds to start back home right
away,” the other boy asserted, as though he wished to think so
himself.
“But I thought I heard something like a faint shout just then, Bluff;
let’s listen a bit; for with that hatchet banging away it’s hard to
catch anything.”
Hardly had Bluff ceased hacking at the moose skull when they caught a
wailing cry, plainly a human voice, calling:
“Help, oh, help!”